Early Man

Dir: Nick Park

2018

**

This really pains me to say, but Nick Park’s Early Man isn’t very good. I adore everything that has come out of Aardman Animations thus far and I think Nick Park is a champion of Britishness but Early Man misses the mark at every step of the way. It started off well, with a strong cast of British voice’s including Eddie Redmayne, Timothy Spall, Richard Ayoade, Selina Griffiths, Johnny Vegas, Mark Williams and Gina Yashere who all make up a small group of silly but instantly lovable Cave persons. The humour is slight, cheeky, a little bit surreal and extremely draft. Perfect, I thought to myself, a very simple but higly detailed story about Cave dwellers much in the vein of Park’s previous works Creature Comforts and Wallace & Gromit, and all the things that have influenced Aardman over the years, such as Monty Python and The Goodies. Tom Hiddleston, Rob Brydon, Kayvan Novak and the brilliant Miriam Margolyes join the cast later on in the film, but not before the story takes a dramatic turn for the worse. I’m not sure I would have gone to see the film at the cinema (which was cold and lonely by the way) if I had known it was about football (ugh, Soccer). Suddenly the beautifully simple Cave dweller theme was taken over by the Bronze Age (literally) and everything became about a nonsensical football match. The jokes started falling flatter and flatter and everything great about the first ten minutes of the film becomes a distant memory. Some of the voice work was actually pretty rubbish too if I’m being honest. Kayvan Novak is known for his silly voices but here he is given nothing but a sensible character to work with. I will have to trust Nick Park that it was the real Tom Hiddleston who voiced the film’s villain and the funniest characters in the film played by Richard Ayoade, Johnny Vegas and Mark Williams got about three lines each. I didn’t think I’d want an Aardman film to be sillier, they’re usually silly enough, but Early Man, a film with a terribly silly premise, is just too darn serious. Where was the Nick Park observational humour and the general daftness? However, I love that so much Britishness has been kept in he film that usually wouldn’t see the likes of day due to its insular humour. Much of it will probably go over the heads of anyone not from the UK but I don’t know why we pander to it so much as a nation. There are loads of American references that we don’t understand in Hollywood films – we either let them slide or we research them – it’s never really a problem and I guess were used to it. A Nick Park film wouldn’t be true if it didn’t have its Britishness about it. For example; Maisie Williams’s character is called Goona – this is what Arsenal Football fans are often referred to as, Johnny Vegas is called Asbo, which is a an ‘Anti-social behaviour order, typically given to naughty kids and Brian and Bryan are based on two famous football pundits. You can google what a zebra crossing is yourselves. Apart from the ‘Britishness’, the tiny glimpse of Park humour of yesteryear and the giant duck, I’m afraid – as unlikable as Early Man isn’t, I felt it to be somewhat of a let down. I didn’t enjoy writing this review one bit.